Designer of the Year: The Incredible Suit-Shrinking Man

His pants are too high, his jackets are too tight. So how did Thom Browne become the most influential menswear designer in America?

thom browne’s world: Most of us don’t live in it, but he’s convinced we’d be better off if we did.

We’d all have less stuff, for one thing. Every day, we’d leave bright, spotless, almost comically underfurnished homes and go to work in bright, spotless, almost comically underfurnished places of business. Browne’s Manhattan showroom is like that. You could drive a parade float through the space between the door and the table where he’s sitting now, talking to some people about the tennis-club-inspired set he wants to build for his next runway show.

Everybody else at the meeting brought stuff: notebooks, binders with color-coded tabs, props. Browne doesn’t even have a pen. The conversation flows around him. He listens, defers. He’s mostly here to field aesthetic questions, to tell the people in charge of ecuting his vision what Thom Browne would do. How high should the hedges be? The ivy—green, or green green? He always knows. He says something precisely inscrutable, people write it down.“You said you wanted that morning feeling,” says Benjamin, the event producer with the glum silent-comedy face, “and, like—”

“Misty,” Browne says. “Like, the grass being a little wet. Morning. But not fog.”

There’s a machine, the lighting guy says, that could help them create the exact conditions Browne’s picturing. “It’s a theatrical thing,” he says. “Liquid nitrogen. And you can fill a big room really quickly.”

Of course. This is New York. You can always rent a machine. Browne is pleased. He’s into anything that makes his fashion shows seem less like fashion shows, anything ridiculous. He staged a battle of the bands at Bergdorf Goodman once. He’s paraded models around a circus ring, put them in skates on an ice rink, made them walk on stilts. He wouldn’t say he enjoys torturing them, but seems to, a little.

Browne’s haircut is the kind you order by number. High and tight, like everything else about him. He’s wearing a dark gray Thom Browne suit and a narrow tie cut from the same material. He could be an early-’60s banker, a defense contractor, an IBM ecutive studying a printout from a computer the size of a one-bedroom apartment. Except nobody at DuPont or Young & Rubicam dressed quite like this. Browne’s sleeves are boys’-department short; his jacket stops just below his belt line. His tie is tucked into his pants and clipped to his deliberately unironed oord. His suit pants are actually shorts: They’re mailman-tight, and they’ve ridden up, revealing a band of squashed-flat leg hair. He’s wearing ankle-high black athletic socks with his giant Frankenstein wingtips, because in Thom Browne’s world, you show ankle. He looks like Pee-wee Herman’s boss.

Browne started selling suits like this one in 2001. He had five of them made, wore them around town as advertising, persuaded his friends to buy them, turned his apartment on the Upper East Side into a showroom-atelier. In the beginning, the suit struck some people as ridiculous, and sometimes it still does. That’s part of its power. Made you look. Also, though, it spoke to guys fed up with the distressed-jeans arms race, with designer seed-feed caps. Guys who’d done the dirtbag-chic thing and were boomeranging toward reactionary squareness. Browne borrowed a hundred grand from his siblings, opened a shop downtown. He designed collections around the suit, building on its links to menswear from the past and how the oddity of its proportions threw its reference points into postmodern relief.

Since then Browne has won awards, been lauded as one of the few designers with a new approach to American menswear, and been referred to as a “philosopher brat” by The New York Times. His bad reviews tend to be bad—there’s this persistent idea that Browne is making clothes that look weird on anyone who isn’t Thom Browne. He’s one of the few designers whose creativity starts arguments—like a Matthew Barney movie or the latest transmission from Radiohead. Almost single-handedly, he’s made other designers question the proportion of a suit. Still, everybody wants to work with him, to touch the high-riding hem of his garment. He’s showing in Europe for the first time next year. Last year he became the first designer to create men’s jewelry for Harry Winston—cuff links, diamond-encrusted versions of his signature tie bars, a blinged-out “class ring.” He’s designing a line for the French skiwear brand Moncler, in a deal similar to the one he struck with Brooks Brothers two years ago.

Brooks Brothers! Venerable clothiers to J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, presidents as far back as Honest Abe, and George Plimpton, and Browne’s father and grandfather. Browne’s signature suit is sort of a mutation of classic Brooks Brothers styling, and after he won Menswear Designer of the Year from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2006, Brooks sought him out as a kind of iconoclast in residence. Black Fleece, the line he created for them, is Browne, except, y’know, not so much. The deal gave him a touch of mainstream legitimacy; the Brooks brand, which hasn’t had a truly Zeitgeisty adherent since Patrick Bateman, got a jolt of youth. “We wanted to attract what I call the young architect,” says Brooks Brothers’ chief merchandising officer, Lou Amendola, “or the young ecutive who wants to move to the next thing, but he likes the reliability of Brooks Brothers.”

The New York Post intimated not long ago that Black Fleece was struggling, but Amendola says the line is “meeting our expectations,” that it’s bringing in those young-architect types, changing their perception of Brooks Brothers. Browne signed a two-year extension of his contract in June, and Brooks opened the first stand-alone Black Fleece store in New York this fall.

Browne’s own line isn’t cheap to produce, and he owns it 100 percent—a rarity—so the Brooks money helps; it becomes a challenge only when they want him to do personal appearances, like the one he almost had to do in L.A. recently. Special people would have stuck around after closing time. “You’d get to meet me,” Browne says. “As riveting as that sounds.”

The suit looks odd; then it doesn’t. You get used to the proportions. Spend enough time with Browne—and his employees, who look like regular dudes from the neck up and Thombots from the clipped ties on down—and “normal” suits start to look weird. (Memo to double-breasted banker types: You know you’re basically wearing genie pants and a hang glider, right? Okay, cool.)

Plus, you start feeling self-conscious about your covered-up ankles. You start feeling like part of the relad-fit masses, like your cubicle-suitable Khaki McButton-down ensemble might as well be sweats and an official volleyball excuse shirt. Browne’s whole look is arguably strange, but it’s exactingly strange, an aesthetic in action. The first Thom Browne Man, wearing his ideas.

Check him out!

Walking tall in his tiny suit!

when browne started his company, he promised himself he’d never rush to meet the day. He’d ease into it like a warm bath. Every morning, he runs eight miles in Central Park. (He wears a buttoned-up polo shirt, adding a Thom Browne cardigan if it’s cold out.) He returns to his one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, chooses from a closet full of identical suits. Gets into character. Takes a taxi downtown.

For years, breakfast was always white toast and café au lait at Pastis. It was close to his first shop. Then he was there one day in his shorts suit, and some yokel came up, slapped a New York Post on his table, open to one of those who-woulda-thunk-it trend pieces about men wearing shorts with suits, and said, “Looks like you’re in style!”

Now he goes to Café Cluny in the West Village, arrives “within half an hour” of ten o’clock, eats his toast and coffee under the twee pencil portraits of notable downtowners like Diane von Furstenberg. There is maybe less risk of tabloid-newspaper-related effrontery here, although you still can’t miss Browne. He looks like a time traveler, an emissary from planet 1958. The Man Who Fell to West 12th Street. Observe the exposed calf below his abbreviated pant leg, the severe brush cut on his peanut-shaped head, the shiny black personal-injury-lawyer briefcase on the floor by his feet. Greetings, rumpled humans.

(He buys the briefcases on eBay. They’re Samsonite, or something like it, and he thinks they’re perfect. “Some things are so perfect there’s no need to redesign them,” he says. “This is one of those things.” He feels this way about Sperry Top-Siders, too—“Good ol’ Sperry did a good job”—and Levi’s, although he doesn’t own jeans.)

Browne doesn’t eat lunch. He’s done with work around seven. Evenings are one drink, champagne from a tumbler—he abhors flutes—then dinner around eight, either at the table they hold for him nightly at Il Cantinori, or at the Four Seasons if he’s feeling flush. Browne’s always lived by a routine: He’s the middle child of seven, and his parents dealt with the logistical demands of raising a big Catholic family by encouraging the kids to play sports. Browne was a swimmer. He was up for practice every morning at six, back in the pool for two more hours after school. He did this for twelve years, through college. He says this shaped him. Living his adult life this way filters out extraneous considerations. He spends his whole workday making choices—what would Thom Browne do?—and doesn’t want to spend his free time doing the same.

Decisions, decisions. Browne likes John F. Kennedy’s two-button Brooks Brothers suits, less because he admires John F. Kennedy—“It’s nothing political at all”—and more because he likes the America that Kennedy lived in. “There wasn’t as much choice in terms of stuff,” he says. “There weren’t a hundred restaurants to choose from. Everything was just simpler.”

Is he serious? Is he putting us on? Is he doing bits from The Buttoned-Down Mind of Thom Browne? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Browne has a high, soft voice and doesn’t open his mouth too wide, doesn’t overemphasize. Sometimes he giggles at his own half jokes. Like the clothes, his affect can be disorienting. You can’t tell how much of what he says is performance—if he’s serious when he says that if he owned his apartment, he’d make it look like the Thom Browne store downtown, all terrazzo floors and exposed fluorescent light and midcentury furniture, like a bank in a Hitchcock movie. “Clean,” he says. “Simple. Easy. Antiseptic. And not very comfortable.”

(In the early ’90s, Browne lived in a studio apartment in Los Angeles. “He spent eight months doing it up before he allowed me to see it,” says Libertine designer Johnson Hartig, who later became Browne’s roommate. “There was one severe midcentury love seat in the living room. That was it. And he was so opposed to what the toilet seat in the bathroom looked like that he took it off. He thought that was more aesthetically pleasing, although it was really inconvenient to use. I remember thinking, God—this guy -really suffers for his art!”)

We sit with him at Café Cluny, tell him this theory we’ve been formulating, about the gradual, and then precipitous, erosion of the national dress code, about the advent of casual Fridays and “dressy sneakers,” and how instead of setting men free, these developments actually created a whole new set of problems for the Public Man, who had to navigate a bewildering range of options just to get dressed in the morning.

“There was something nice about the days when everyone put a suit on to go to work,” Browne agrees. “Sometimes, when it comes to clothing, people having too much of a choice is not the best thing.”

Browne, 42, grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in woods turning suburban. He was closest to his younger sister Jean, because they were on the swim team together, but he also says Jean has described Young Thom as “boring.”

“I wasn’t, though,” Browne says. “I was just quiet. I liked to spend time by myself.”

So he was mostly alone, or underwater. It wasn’t bad. There was school, there was sports, and when he did well in both, he was happy. He wore Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers, like everybody else.

He did plays in school, took art classes, but the idea that you could make a career for yourself in a creative field never occurred to him. You became a lawyer or a businessman. Everyone in Browne’s immediate family is a lawyer or a businessman except Mary Beth, who became a surgeon. Browne went to Notre Dame after high school, opted out of a Japanese-studies major when his swim-team commitments got in the way of a year abroad, ended up majoring in business.

He doesn’t have an artist’s flight-from-suburban-conformity story to tell. He liked conformity. No one else in his family does anything like what he does, but he never talks about it in terms of rebellion. In a lot of ways, the conceptual Thom Browne Man—fit, successful, dressed according to certain normative standards—is exactly the man Browne’s own upbringing should have produced. Except, y’know, not so much.

Browne graduated with no desire to use that business degree, moved to Los Angeles, tried acting. Somewhere there exists a Motrin commercial in which he plays a runner with a side ache. He picked up day-job work at a casting agency. Treaded water. Went to some parties, met Hartig, who used to be another actor of undistinguished portfolio. Hartig altered vintage clothes and wore them around. Hartig cut up old suits, tweaked the silhouette.

By watching Hartig experiment with suits, Browne says, “I got the bug to do it, but I knew I wanted to actually make them, from scratch.” Early on, he’d wash vintage suits and throw them in the dryer. He was trying to make them look like Thom Browne suits before anybody knew what a Thom Browne suit was. He was thinking about that late-’50s-early-’60s organization-man moment, post–electric typewriter, pre–Meet the

Beatles. He wanted a suit that looked the way he thought suits had looked back then. The distinction matters; the silhouette of the Thom Browne suit actually, technically started out as Browne misremembering classic American tailoring.

“If you look at JFK,” Browne says, “the suits he used to wear—I always thought the jacket was shorter. In actuality, it wasn’t so short. The trousers weren’t as slim as they seemed. In my head, it was different.”

This was L.A. in the ’90s—the city and the moment that gave us the chain wallet, the barbed-wire tattoo, guys dressing like cast members from the Broadway version of Monster Garage—and going out in shrunken Brooks Brothers was a protest against the tyranny of the casual. A conformist uniform became a nonconformist gesture; Browne didn’t like L.A., and dressing like he did externalized his out-of-placeness. He wore gray flannel because gray flannel was the way he felt inside. People laughed. People asked why he was so dressed up. Where the flood was.

Finally, in 1998, he sold his old diesel Mercedes and moved to New York. Inside of two weeks, he had a wholesale job at Armani. (“I was the only one,” he says, “that ever bought anything in a 36 short.”) He moved on to Club Monaco, where he designed slim trousers, cardigans, oord shirts—the kind of stuff he wanted to wear. He says the customers didn’t feel the same way about it; Club Monaco CEO John Mehas puts it more diplomatically, saying Browne helped “evolve” the Club Monaco man and that his stuff “performed well in major metro areas—New York, Los Angeles.”

(Go into a Club Monaco today and it’s all, like, Browne-y—cashmere cardigans, gray suits, Pencey Prep crests. His influence is everywhere. At this point, anyone lacking the resources to shop at Thom Browne can probably build a Thom Browne–esque wardrobe from various stores around the mall. Thom Browne sneezes and H&M and Banana Republic catch colds.)

Club Monaco had just become part of the Ralph Lauren empire. Ralph himself wasn’t that involved with the brand, but Browne’s boyfriend at the time was Charles Fagan, an ecutive VP at Polo and a member of Ralph’s inner circle. Browne got to know Ralph. Ralph gave him some advice about “business things” and about using ideas to sell clothes. In a way, Browne’s business-uncasual vision is Ralph’s peerlessly constructed touch-football-and-cattle-drives WASP fantasia plus irony and time.

“I think that’s what Ralph has done best,” Browne says. “That’s why I like to do my shows. I like to create a world that gives the clothes that much more meaning, as opposed to making something that just hangs on a hanger, lifeless.”

A word about the shows: Browne says every collection starts with that gray suit, the one he’s been making for seven years, the backbone of his business. When he puts together a show, he’s trying to enhance the suit’s connotations by sending it down the runway in various guises, like an actor cast in a series of ever-more-surreal sequences. Browne’s shows are put together with craft and wit and very little of menswear’s customary Blue Steel self-seriousness, but there’s also a provocative, even fetishistic, element. The men’s--fashion trade magazine DNR once described Browne’s shows, pricelessly, as “often influenced by women’s wear and unnamed, dark forces”; the clothes are mutated Browne, Browne unbound, Browne possibly working some stuff out.

Browne says designing suits has always come easily to him, to the point where he can find it hard to think of himself as a “fashion designer.” Sometimes, at the shows—typically attended by a small group of business associates, media types, and loyal customers, and by Browne’s mom, whom he always seats in the front row—you can see him trying extra hard to design like one.

He’s covered that gray suit in little gray rosettes. Paired it with capelets, clear plastic sofa-slipcover outerwear, tulle man-tutus, skorts. He’s turned the jacket into a curtain of car-wash fringe, hemmed the trousers to groin height for that I-forgot-my-pants effect. At a circus-themed show he staged to present his fall 2008 line, he dressed some poor underfed bastard in a bowler hat and an ostrich-feather suit, like a character from a Disney movie about a pigeon who yearns to become a barrister.

He usually comes up with the clothes first, reverse-engineers the theme. Usually it’s something healthy, sporty, all-American.

He’s based shows around surfing, ice-skating, tennis. Totems of upper-crust privilege are a constant—bow ties, crests, armbands. (Thom Browne’s guys looked like Chuck Bass before anybody knew who Chuck Bass was.) But the theme that recurs the most is restraint. Browne has strapped models into suits with the sleeves tied in back like straitjackets, bound them from head to toe in argyle neckties, sent them down the runway two at a time in three-legged pants. Healthy, all-American manliness, hobbled and hampered and fettered by its own sporty accoutrements.

Browne doesn’t like to talk about what it’s all supposed to mean. He swears he wasn’t trying to make any nonaesthetic point, for example, by tying that guy up in neckwear. “I thought it looked funny and cool,” he says, “and I wanted to see how he walked, tied up. And the guys with their arms behind their backs—it was more that the shirtsleeves were so long, so I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we tied it?’ It had nothing to do with, y’know, tying their hands behind their backs.”

He says there’s no agenda to his work, that he’s not making a point by playing around with masculine archetypes. He’s gay, and in his work he simultaneously idealizes and deconstructs the uniform of a conservative cultural moment not known for its tolerance of difference, but he resists any interpretation of his clothes that links those two ideas. His jaw locks up tight when the notion is raised; it’s the first time he seems bothered by a question.

“It has nothing to do with it,” he says. “It has nothing to do with anything I do. It has nothing to do with it at all.”

He says he never felt isolated, growing up, never saw sports-and-school Allentown as a straitjacket. He liked it. And when he borrows elements from womenswear, ties a guy up, dresses a guy like a bird, he’s not gluing new pages into the Preppy Handbook or imagining a world where JFK could greet the New Frontier in a jacket puffed out with tulle; he’s just trying to do something that hasn’t been done before.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I’m just, like, ‘Hey, let’s put a guy in a skirt! It’ll be funny! Won’t that look great?’ If I spent that much time thinking about everything, I’d never get anything done. I’m very instinctual. If I want to do something, I don’t politically think about how it’s going to be perceived. Everything I do is very personal, and I think about it a lot, but not as seriously as some people think. Sometimes I wish I was as smart as some people make it seem.”

Still—wherever it’s coming from, there is something about a man in a tutu that drives some critics crazy. Browne is philosophical about this. “If you’re doing something different, there’s going to be very different opinions on it,” he says. “It’s like when I walk outside with my pants like this. I have to expect that some people are going to think it’s funny and some people are going to think it’s great. I don’t ever want to do something that people are going to be fine with.”

One of the arguments people make, though, is that the clothes he’s showing are somehow irresponsible in their impracticality—as if men will someday wake up with closets full of $4,300 Thom Browne suits and be like, What have I done?

“I think I’m being hugely responsible,” Browne says. “I think this is what I’m supposed to be doing. As a ‘designer’”—you can hear the quote marks—“I’m supposed to be provoking people’s reactions, and getting people to see things differently. I think more of us should be doing this. Because yeah, maybe guys are not gonna want to wear my stuff, but they’ll think that they can maybe wear something a little bit more than what they’ve been wearing. That’s the only way things move forward.”

After breakfast, Thom Browne picks up his briefcase, clop-clops across the cobblestones of the Village in his big black shoes, and catches the E train to Long Island City. His factory occupies the top floor of a building in the Erector-set shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. Browne climbs three flights of battleship-gray stairs, pushes open a door that says primo coat corp, enters a fluorescent-lit room where a team of tailors as diverse as Queens itself—sixty or sixty-five people, chattering Latinas with Santa Maria prayer cards pinned to the lights on their workbenches, old Italians bent like drinking straws at the shoulders from a lifetime of looking closely—cut patterns, press pants, sew striped linings into jackets. Aside from the Black Fleece stuff (which is produced in Italy), nearly everything Browne sells is made here.

There’s undoubtedly a little sales pitch to Browne’s professed adoration of the past. (He says he admires the painstaking early-’60s production design on Mad Men but can’t watch it because he hates seeing all these well-dressed midcentury-modern men depicted as beasts who do nothing but booze and smoke and cheat on their wives.) But the truth about the past is that they -really did do some things better back then, which is why Browne loves this place and Rocco Ciccarelli, who owns it.

Rocco has white hair and a diagonal scar across his nose and upper lip. He was born in Italy, the son of a tailor. He made his first suit when he was 14—“and I’m 39 now,” he says. (He’s 72.) His factory is one of the last places in New York, and thus in America, that still makes suits the old-fashioned way. What is not sewn by hand is sewn on twenty-year-old Singer sewing machines. The sewing machines are made of iron and look heavy as anvils. They fill the room with intermittent bursts of noise, like machine-gun fire, but otherwise it’s weirdly quiet. The newest technology on the factory floor is the phone system. It’s from the ’90s.

Browne and Rocco began working together when Browne started his company. Browne says his line wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Rocco, that no one else can translate his ideas the way Rocco does, that no one knows this much about construction, that no one takes this kind of care.

Rocco makes the clothes for Browne’s runway shows here, too. He made the three-legged pants. “I tell him,” Rocco says, “my career—it will be the last thing I will do. Pants with three legs! What is left now—to make a jacket with three sleeves?”

“But that’s the perfect example,” Browne says, smiling. “It could only be done by Rocco. Because a lot of people could have jury-rigged two trousers together, but this was a seriously well-made trouser.”

Browne invites Rocco to every show he does; he’s only attended once.

“I don’t like to see my work when it is finished,” he says. “Because I will self-criticize myself. And I will have a lousy evening. We know there is not such a thing as a perfect garment. You never see a perfect garment. But I always see something that could be done better than what I did.”

This is the part of Thom Browne’s work that nobody talks about—the craftsmanship that goes into all those pants and jackets. At some point, as Browne’s business grows, it won’t be practical to do things here. Not in New York, probably not in America. But for the moment, Browne, the man out of time, can work with Rocco, the last of the breed.

“This is the best part of the day,” Browne says. “This is where it is—this is why Thom Browne is Thom Browne. This is what it is.”

He’s got work to do, too. He heads for the back of the room to inspect a rack of finished suits. He’s taken off his jacket. He looks—there’s no other way to say it—comfortable.

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